FXDesktopVolumePositions has a volume creation timestamp embedded into the "file" name for the volume (highlight in yellow below). This has been extracted and converted to human readable time (highlight in orange below).

Thanks to @4n68r for pointing out broke stuff (and for using the script!)

The ICNS Icon export function was also fixed.

Fixed support for some *.sfl2 files that were cranky and had no names.

Recently there has been some questions on the forums and Twitter as to how to mount forensic disk images that were captured from Mac system that implemented 4k block sizes. A few years ago, Mac systems started to use 4k blocks instead of 512 byte block sizes. This has caused some issues where you need to mount the image to do analysis without a major forensic suite. BlackBag wrote a good blog article on this last month however I hope to expand on it just a bit to include E01 files and FileVault encryption scenarios.

I will also detail how to mount the forensic disk images using newer APFS file system so analysts can start to do their thing while all the forensic tools catch up! APFS disk images already appear to use 4k block sizes as the default, at least on all my test systems. If you see otherwise, please let me know!

This article will try to provide some options to mount these images, however it cannot solve all the issues or combinations of disks/block sizes/host operating systems – it seems that you will have to upgrade to 10.13 at some point to solve many of these problems.

HFS+ 4k and FileVault Images

The following steps will bring you from a full HFS+ FileVault 4k disk image in EWF format to a mounted image using macOS 10.13. (If you have a raw (non-EWF) image, you can bypass steps 1 and 3.)

1. Create a mount point to put the xmount converted DMG image (converted from EWF format). [sudo is required when dealing with /Volumes/ since 10.12]

2. Create another mount point to put the mounted image on. This will act as the root volume for the mounted image.

3. Using xmount (sudo required) to convert from EWF (--in) to DMG (--out) format. DMG is selected here since it is very Mac friendly. Provide the E01 image (use E?? if using segments) and the converted image mount point created in Step 1. This could take a few seconds if the disk image is large. Theoretically you can use another mounting utility, I've tried ewfmount on 10.13 and ran into errors that I'm still investigating. Having trouble installing Xmount? Does it say OS X Fuse is not installed? Look in the comments section for a fix.

4. Using hdiutil, attach (but don’t yet mount) the DMG file created in Step 3. Using the hidden argument –blocksize we can specify 4096 (‘4k’ can also be used here). It is worth noting here that while hidden in 10.13 this option does not appear to exist in 10.12 versions of this utility. It is also is not detailed in the hdiutil man page. Gotta love hidden functionality! This will output a bunch of /dev/disk* options, however none of these are the ones you need thanks to CoreStorage.

5. If the image is FileVault encrypted a password window will appear, please put the password for the disk in here so it can be unlocked.

If you want to do this all via the command line (you rock!) you can pass –stdinpass to the hdiutil command in Step 4 where it will prompt you for the password.

You will then need to use ‘diskutil cs unlockVolume <LogicalVolumeGUID> ‘ after determining the Logical Volume GUID to use by using ‘diskutil cs list’. (Similar to Step 6) Note the Lock Status highlighted in the screenshots below.

6. Next use ‘diskutil cs list’ to determine which disk to using in Step 7. Determine which volume you will be performing analysis on, in the screenshot above it is /dev/disk6.

7. Using mount_hfs (with sudo again) we can mount /dev/disk6 (the ‘#’ is just a variable used above, yours may be a different number) using a variety of options (you can choose your own, however I normally use read only, ignore ownership, and limit binary execution options. Also provide it the second mount point you created in Step 2.

If it all works out, congrats you now have a mounted image!

APFS Images

A similar approach can be used for new APFS disk images. Anyone who has tried to capture their disk images in 10.13 might have had a problem doing so due to System Integrity Protection (SIP). SIP is now protecting /dev and will likely make forensic acquisition and analysis more difficult if you happen to interact with /dev often. Easy fix – disable SIP. While not technically good for security purposes, it can be a general pain in the posterior to have on. To disable it, reboot into Recovery mode, open the Terminal and type ‘csrutil disable’ and restart the system. Yes, you can re-enable it later with ‘csrutil enable’.

Because it is so similar to the process above, my description of each step here will be limited. In Step 4 we do not need to use –blocksize as it just happens to work without it. In Step 5, instead of ‘diskutil cs list’ we use ‘diskutil ap list’ – APFS does not use CoreStorage (cs) and instead uses APFS containerization (ap). The ‘ap’ will also be used in Step 6. Step 7 uses mount_apfs instead of mount_hfs for obvious reasons and would be used on /dev/disk6s1 as shown in the example screenshot below.

New with 10.13 High Sierra are the newer format *.sfl2 Mac MRU files. The format changes slightly from the older *.sfl files found in 10.11 and 10.12. It also uses the analyst infuriating NSKeyedArchiver format. An example of the Recent Applications MRU can be seen below.

Added in Spotlight Shortcuts

I've updated my macMRU.py script to parse the Spotlight Shortcuts plist file that I consider to be very MRU-like. This plist file contains what the user typed into the Spotlight search window, what they clicked on, and when this all occurred. You can find artifacts of application usage, documents, emails, photos, etc.

Bookmark and Alias BLOB Parsing

The second part of the update (and probably the most requested!) was to add in arguments to allow the analyst to see the parse out the Bookmark and Alias BLOB data. Previously the script only had an option to show the BLOB hexdump. Using mac_alias [download here], the script can now parse these BLOBs. This comes with a caveat, this script relies on the documented structures by others (with a few minor changes by my own research). These have not been officially documented by Apple therefore YMMV. Many of us are still researching these, hopefully this script will help the process! This update provides three new arguments:

--blob_hex = This is the same as what --blob was before. Just a hexdump of the BLOB data.

--blob_parse_raw = This shows the raw output from mac_alias, not exactly the easiest to read but good for debugging.

--blob_parse_human = This shows the pieces of the BLOBs in a (mostly) human-friendly (example below).

I want to say thank you to a few folks that allowed these additions to be made:

Alastair Houghton & Wim Lewis - For mac_alias and the reversing the Alias/Bookmark structures. I took a shot at it years ago and gave up, really appreciate someone else's effort!

Phill Moore of thisweekin4n6.com - You'll notice some support for legacy keys in the com.apple.recentitems.plist have also been added in this update thanks to Phil and his oddly old MRUs files! :) I also appreciate his testing of this tool on Windows also. (Sorry Phil, didn't get a chance to test it on Windows yet!)

Shout out to Patrick Olsen for his work on Alias V3 structures. Unfortunately I did not get to use his research - turns out V3 Alias BLOBs do not get used in any of the MRUs that I'm parsing in this script (they are all V2)! Maybe in the future!

Yep, you read that right - Mac Location Scraper! I've updated my 'iOS Location Scraper' script to be compatible with the same location database found on iOS - the cache_encryptedA.db (and lockCache_encryptedA.db) that are now found on macOS at least as far back as 10.8.

On macOS these databases hold similar Wi-Fi location data. I have found these databases to be located in the /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n00000sm00006d/C/ directory. It appears to store about last seven days worth of Wi-Fi related data.

I have also updated the script to support the newer 'routined' CoreRoutine.sqlite database on iOS 10. This database does tend to get stored with a *.shm/*.wal database files so I would recommend pulling off all the files and consolidating them into the main database *.sqlite file, otherwise all the data will not be extracted.